Thanks for your answers to my questions recently! They're much appreciated. I was just wondering how scholars were able to derive phonetic value from cuneiform scribes when they first decoded Akkadian and Sumerian? I've never quite understood that. Hopefully you can shed some light on the topic. Cheers!
Silim, and certainly!
The short answer is, Cuneiform languages were deciphered backwards in time. If you’ve heard of the Rosetta Stone, you know that Egyptian hieroglyphics were deciphered using that document (and other works) which included both the hieroglyphics and other languages (in that case, Greek). The decipherment of Cuneiform languages used basically the same process.
The first cuneiform language decoded was Old Persian, which was written with a late variety of cuneiform that was primarily phonetic and was pretty easily decipherable using documents of the Rosetta Stone type. It was also easy to verify as it’s a direct ancestor language to modern Persian.
From there, several different people, notably Henry Rawlinson and Edward Hincks, worked independently to use another set of “rosetta stones”, most famously the Behistun Inscription, to decipher Akkadian. Exactly how they did so is actually not fully understood (this happened in the 1850s, so not all their documents have been preserved) but an independent jury found that the decipherments seemed legitimate and matched with one another, so Akkadian was declared deciphered in 1857. For a description of this process, I recommend Daniels’ The World’s Writing Systems (1996).
And from there, Sumerian was actually the easiest jump — we have a large number of “schoolbook” tablets intended to teach Akkadian speakers how to write and speak Sumerian, since the governments of Assyria & Babylonia used Sumerian for documentation etc. long after it was commonly spoken. These illustrated both how to write and say a large number of Sumerian words, so decipherment was easy.
